Although residents of Staten Island won the battle to close the Fresh Kills Landfill, New Yorkers should feel a kind of perverse pride at the mound of garbage they’ve created.

Nobody, but nobody, throws out garbage like New Yorkers.

After all, with two full years of heavy-duty dumping to go before the landfill is permanently mothballed, Fresh Kills is the world’s largest junk pile.

Every day, more than 13,000 tons of rubbish are entombed at the city’s last remaining landfill.

If stench-addled Staten Islanders had left well enough alone, the 180-foot mountain of trash under construction would have topped out at 500 feet — making it taller than Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Khufu, the final resting place of eminent kings.

But shortly after the 20th century’s odometer rolls over to 21, Fresh Kills will be closed and New York will send its garbage where it belongs: to out-of-state landfills. (Take that, Virginia! You ain’t only for lovers, you know, you’re for New York’s trash!)

The dump’s closing is being universally hailed — but there is a bittersweet quality to it.

“I will definitely miss the place,” said Steve Violetta, who has worked for the Sanitation Department for 30 years, the last 11 at Fresh Kills, which opened in 1948.

“Once Fresh Kills goes, it’s the end of an era.”

OK, so maybe you’re not too upset about that. But consider that without Fresh Kills, residents of this dirty, stinkin’ town will no longer have a constant reminder of our wasteful ways. The 6.2 pounds of trash produced every day by every household will disappear from the curbside, never to be seen again.

That’s one of the reasons that the Sanitation Department started offering tours a few years ago. They were popular among grad students, waste-management professionals and, oddly, Japanese tourists, but were quickly abandoned when Staten Island officials complained that their borough offered other, more worthy attractions for visitors.

More worthy than a garbage dump that can be seen from space?

And, truth be told, Fresh Kills is not 3,000 acres of open, festering garbage. Garbage can be seen only on the very top part of the active dumping ground — the last of four manmade mountains on site.

Sure, sea gulls congregate as if preparing for a Hitchcock remake, and huge, stegosaurus-like cranes pick up mound after mound of offal from barges, but the place is remarkably peaceful.

In fact, from certain angles, the three large, grass-covered hills offer a peaceful landscape — if you hold your nose.

Naturally, though, Staten Island leaders say they won’t feel even a touch of sadness when the dump eventually closes on Dec. 31, 2001.

“There’s no bittersweet quality [to the closing] at all, God no,” said Borough President Guy Molinari, one of three generations of Molinaris who fought against the dump over the last 50 years.

“When that dump closes, we’re going to throw a party that will make the millennium in Times Square look like a family picnic.”